Latest from Laurence M. Vance

May 22, 2014
Lawmakers in the state of Connecticut recently passed legislation to ban chocolate milk from the state’s public schools. The milk ban was included in a bill to make “minor revisions” to the state’s education statutes that unanimously ...

May 8, 2014
Tax season is over, but tax-reform proposals are perennial.
America’s current income-tax system was inaugurated in 1913 with the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment. It began quite modestly, with a 1 percent tax on income above $3,000 ($4,000 for married ...

April 29, 2014
“There is something phony about this war,” said U.S. Sen. William Borah (R-Idaho) about the relative lack of military action by the Allies during the early months of World War II after Germany invaded Poland. “You would think that ...

April 10, 2014
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is under fire by Republicans and conservatives yet again. And for good reason.
First it was the “Fast and Furious” operation in Phoenix, where ATF agents allowed illegal gun sales that ...

March 26, 2014
Barack Obama earlier this month unveiled his $3.9 trillion budget plan for fiscal year 2015. “It is a road map for creating jobs with good wages and expanding opportunity for Americans,” said the president.
Although the Constitution doesn’t ...

March 6, 2014
Although the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi have ended, some U.S. athletes will be reminded of their participation come tax time next year. Twenty-eight American athletes won an Olympic medal in the Sochi games (9 gold, 7 silver, and ...

February 18, 2014
The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is touting the changes to Social Security for 2014.
Instituted during the New Deal, Social Security, a federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, provides monthly benefits for retirement, disability, ...

January 31, 2014
Since December of last year, Democrats in the Senate have once again been pushing to extend unemployment benefits that had already been extended many times. Senate Republicans are not opposed on principle, just on how the extended benefits ...

January 16, 2014
For more than 40 years now the U.S. government has been waging its War on Drugs. After declaring drug abuse to be “America’s public enemy number one” and “a national emergency,” Richard Nixon employed military rhetoric as he launched ...

January 8, 2014
“We Accept EBT” says the new large sign outside of a small, local food market near my house. Electronic Benefit Transfer or EBT is the system used by states to issue welfare benefits on a card that looks like ...

Reading List

Prepared by Richard M. Ebeling

Austrian economics is a distinctive approach to the discipline of economics that analyzes market forces without ever losing sight of the logic of individual human action. Two of the major Austrian economists in the 20th century have been Friedrich A. Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Ludwig von Mises. Posted below is an Austrian Economics reading list prepared by Richard M. Ebeling, economics professor at Northwood University in Midland and former president of the Foundation for Economic Education and vice president of academic affairs at FFF.